Gender and achievement: are girls the “success stories” of restructured education systems?

Abstract

There is a popular perception that girls’ academic success means that they have taken up the kinds of gender performances in the classroom previously associated with boys. However, research into classrooms show that, amongst even the highest achieving pupils, girls are anxious about doing well and concerned about their relationships with other pupils. This paper offers an explanation as to how gendered classroom expectations and performances of girls have been translated from “failure” to “victory” without any actual change in behaviours. The explanation for this is located in education policy and gender theory but the discussion here focuses attention on the implications of these for schools, classroom practices and teachers. The reason for doing so is a concern that feminist writing should engage more closely with the daily lives of teachers.

Keywords:

• achievement
• gender
• girls
• school

Notes

1. In common with other second wave feminist perspectives e.g. radical, black and Marxist‐socialist feminisms.

2. The study, The Gendered Subjectivities of High Achieving Pupils, was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES‐062‐23‐0462). The project sought to explore the gender subjectivities of pupils who were high achieving but who remained popular with their peers. The study involved 71 high achieving pupils (36 girls; 35 boys) in Year 8 (12–13 year olds) attending nine co‐educational state secondary schools in rural, small town and city locations in the South‐east and the Midland areas of Britain. Nine of the pupils were from minority ethnic groups (South Asian, Chinese, mixed‐race, North African, South American, Turkish, and three African‐Caribbean). Using parental occupation as an indicator, 39 pupils were from middle class and 23 from working class backgrounds, with nine pupils unassigned. The reason for centring the study on Year 8 pupils is because previous research has identifed this age as a point at which many pupils lose interest in school and start to underperform (Rudduck, Chaplain, and Wallace 1996; Barber 1997; Myhill 2002). As such, it was particularly interesting to explore academic success with this year group.

All the pupils who took part in the interviews were identified as high achieving by their teachers and were allocated to classes that reflected this achievement. “High achievement” was defined as those who achieved highly across a range of subjects, and evidence to support identification was provided via details of pupils’ Key Stage 2 SATs results and their recent grades across subject areas. In a number of cases pupils had been identified as Gifted and Talented at particular subject areas expressed by educational credentials [even though the research team did not subscribe to the view that achievement should be conceived so narrowly (Francis and Skelton 2005)]. It is important to note that what was seen to consititute “high achieving” differed from school to school. Using teachers’ verbal assessment and test results the children who were literally “top of the class” (coming in the top three or four) were identified.

Interviews and ethnographic observations were carried out in each school. The observations documented the interactions taking place in the classroom, and focused particularly on the behaviours of those children identified as high achieving. Each class of children was tracked through different lessons for a full school day. Semi‐structured, individual interviews were then undertaken with the identified pupils. Interview recordings were fully transcribed: names used are pseudonyms. The qualitative analysis has involved content analysis and Foucauldian analysis of discourse (Burman and Parker 1993), and was processed using the NVivo package.